Usage: This piece is dated and it applied to a situation that only existed for a couple of weeks in 2020. Luckily, it was submitted and appeared in two publications in the short time that Auburn took to find a new coach. You may run it as is for mild chuckles, or mine it for ideas for new versions—you could take just about any college football program with a coaching vacancy, and any politician with well-known traits and make some good variations on this one. Act fast—those vacancies don’t last long.
Make Auburn Great Again
Auburn University has hired a search firm to find candidates for the recently-vacated position of head football coach. I suggest that they ditch the search firm and hire the obvious candidate: Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Trump will soon have time on his hands, and he is already wildly popular in Alabama. On his say-so, we rejected the vastly experienced Jeff Sessions and put former Auburn coach Tuberville into the U.S. Senate. The football-to-government pipeline already exists, and surely it can go both ways.
Mr. Trump’s unconventional approach is sorely needed now that opponents are no longer dazzled by Coach Malzhan’s hurry-up offense. Mr. Trump may not have experience or know-how, but he has chutzpah (you need a napkin to pronounce it, but it's ksch-HOOTS-pa) and would bring innovations to the game, to wit: 1) The Impermeable Wall defense. Sneak your biggest players into the opposition’s training table all week, so THEY pay to build YOUR wall); 2) The Scoreboard Challenge, in which you exhaust the opponents and the officials by filing lawsuits against the scorekeeper, the scoreboard manufacturer, and the inventors of math, every time the opponent’s score is increased; and 3) The Mid-Game Pep Rally, in which you flood the field with highly motivated boosters, then nudge the dead ball forward with your feet while everyone is distracted; once you nudge the ball over the goal line, declare the game over and run for the bus; you then ignore the actual score that appears in the newspaper the next day. This play is very gratifying but it does require mass hypnosis and also building your own alternate-reality sports network to acknowledge your victory.
Or stick with the search firm, and watch Coach Saban’s eyes light up when he realizes that Auburn will be in rebuilding mode, and also playing by the written rules of the game, for the remainder of his career in Tuscaloosa. If not national championships, he will at least have guaranteed Iron Bowl victories for 'Bama out to the horizon.
The choice is clear.
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This work appeared in AL.com on December 18, 2020.
This work appeared in The Anniston Star on December 19, 2020.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.